We brought you the trailer a while back, now here’s the review. Opens at Kimball’s this Friday.

It is ironic that Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel “Jane Eyre,” one of the books that could be most relied upon to elicit groans and yawns from a high school English class, is also one of literature’s most frequently adapted for the screen. For this reason, and because it has been done very well in the past, we are forced to wonder if this latest version of the story about piety, suffering in silence, smoldering eroticism and Gothic horror was truly necessary or merely a filmmaker’s passion project.

Necessity is certainly debatable, but this new adaptation’s quality is not. “Jane Eyre” is a sumptuous, transcendent melodrama — it feels more tragic, more authentic and more alive than ever before.

Mia Wasikowska steps into the shoes of Jane, a young woman who, after a childhood spent at a soul-crushing boarding school where she was taught little more than how to endure pain, becomes the governess at Thornfield Hall for the cold Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbender). Astonishingly, the plain, penniless Jane and the aristocratic, wealthy Mr. Rochester fall for each other. Happiness, it seems, is finally in our heroine’s grasp. But it will be sorely tested when Jane discovers that Mr. Rochester is hiding a terrible secret.

Director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) and cinematographer Adriano Goldman shoot “Jane Eyre” as if it were the offspring of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” — much of it by candlelight. The famed heather-crusted moors appear as something otherworldly, shrouded in mist and fog, and echoing ghostly voices carried on the wind.

Dario Marianelli’s score is, by turns, plaintive and tender and as menacing as the rain-lashed heath.

The script, evoking not just Brontë, but also Dickens and even Cinderella, is told through the skillful use of flashbacks; it is trim and nimble, showing evidence of great compression but equally grand narrative economy.

This is easily the most spiritual of the adaptations. Fukunaga mines the Gothic horror elements of the novel better than any of his predecessors, evoking phantoms, ghouls and specters — of course, the only demons here are secrets, clamoring to get into the light.

It is also the most blatantly feminist. “I wish I could have action, have a life, like a man,” Jane tells us, conjuring freedom and free will as untasted ideals.

Alone and isolated in the world, she has no choice but to secure her own future as best she can. But doing so requires that she abide by a suffocating legion of rules and social mores designed to stifle her sex’s ambitions. The ability to act, without constraint or prejudice, and the capacity to think as she wills, without fear or insincerity, is Jane’s ideal.

Wasikowska, not a gorgeous actress nor as appropriately plain as she is made out to be here, does a tremendous job as the courageous, humble, feisty and candid Jane — virtues that might come off as insufferable affectations were the heroine and the woman bringing her to life not so authentic. Jane is not a saint, but she does endure her unjust sufferings without self-pity. A life of hardship has created a backbone of steel that somehow stopped short of her heart.

The great Fassbender plays Rochester not as a raging dynamo, as has been done in the past, but rather a sullen, abrupt, cynical and deeply wounded human being. At first glance, and, to be honest, several glances beyond that, we genuinely don’t know if he is a good man or even a likable one. But because Rochester’s Victorian wildness is never far from his dashing charisma and innate goodness, he never feels cut off from Jane’s redemption or ours.

The result of all this fussing is neither stiff and inflexible nor radically divergent and reimagined. It is exactly as it should be: a dynamic romance that rings true with the most important critic of all, our hearts.

JANE EYRE

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell, Amelia Clarkson, Sally Hawkins, Holliday Grainger, Tamzin Merchant

Director: Cary Fukunaga

Rated: PG-13 (for some thematic elements including a nude image and brief violent content)

Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Photo by ‘Jane Eyre’